This application claims priority under 35 U.S.C. §119(a) on Patent Application No. 2006-282764 filed in Japan on Oct. 17, 2006, the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to image forming apparatuses such as standalone machines including printing devices and facsimile machines, as well as multifunction machines and the like having various modes such as copying, printing, scanning, and faxing.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, various techniques have been proposed for curbing power costs due to the execution of print jobs in image forming apparatuses, including for example JP 2000-112694A (hereinafter referred to as patent document 1) and JP 2005-254736A (hereinafter referred to as patent document 2).
Patent document 1 discloses a print control device that uses printing resources secured intrinsically for use in a nighttime time period to perform printing output in a nighttime time period of print data that has been spooled in the daytime.
Furthermore, patent document 2 discloses an image forming apparatus described below in which image data received during a nighttime standby mode is successively stored to a hard disk, and when a printing completion time has been set for the stored image data, image forming operations are commenced during the nighttime mode period if the commencement time for the image forming operation is a time during the nighttime standby mode.
Both of the devices described in patent document 1 and patent document 2 are aimed at reducing power costs by executing accumulated print jobs during a nighttime mode period in which power rates are low.
However, from a perspective of power costs, there are times when carrying out printing output at nighttime does not necessarily result in a reduction in power costs. For example, in relation to print jobs received during the nighttime standby mode such as fax receptions or the like, a warm up operation is carried out each time fax data is received so that these can be output upon receipt thereof, which is a problem in that power costs rise undesirably.
Also, in order to keep the warm up operations to a minimum, in patent document 2, image data received during the nighttime standby mode is successively stored to a hard disk and the stored image data undergoes print processing as a group during the nighttime mode period, but in a case where there is a small amount of image data stored on the hard disk, the power costs may be substantially lower by performing printing after the completion of a warm up operation that is performed after turning on the power at daytime rather than performing print processing of the image data by commencing a warm up operation during the nighttime mode period.